Abstract

Operating systems are the first developed piece of software for a computer and it is still the first application to run over our computers. Software developers spent a lot of time and efforts to build reliable systems using different philosophies and software engineering strategies. They built monolithic kernels, micro-kernels, pico-kernels, etc. to fulfill users' requirements and hardware developments as well. However, Most of the proposed solutions for operating systems design and implementation are for solving traditional problems. Operating systems are still constructed as a general piece of software used for either machine's resource management or as a virtual machine for the higher level user applications. In our research we were inspired by the idea of building specialized operating systems. This idea will affect the way we think about operating systems, the way they are designed, and the way they operate. However, creating an operating system from the scratch for a specific purpose is a quite tedious task. Therefore, we though of constructing a framework for building operating system that can be built out of pluggable components. EZeus operating system is our extensible operating system that we had out of our research efforts. It is based over component based software development concepts. The Crux is the core of the system and acting as a framework for the system components. It provides basic services for components storage, communication, execution, and protection. It was designed and implemented to be independent of any other components or any external application. This system allowed us to build our own component model. This model allows system extenders to build specialized services in a systematic way. In addition, we could characterize extensible operating systems. We were able to identify the quality attributes that any extensible operating system should have. We defined factors affecting each quality attribute, architectural decisions that should be taken to satisfy this quality attributed for any extensible operating system, and measures that can be taken to assess each quality attribute. In addition, we spent considerable time and effort to reach our current efficient inter­component communication mechanism. We could have almost 100 times faster communication mechanism between any two components at different address spaces. In addition, we used a hybrid of software architecture evaluation methods to evaluate our operating system and prove that operating systems are not only for performance and security. Operating systems must have their design and architectures evaluated to make sure that they can be extended easily. At the end we could model, design, implement, and test our system according to the latest software engineering standards and solve the traditional communication problem of operating systems.

School

School of Sciences and Engineering

Department

Computer Science & Engineering Department

Degree Name

MS in Computer Science

Date of Award

2-1-2004

Online Submission Date

1-1-2003

First Advisor

Amr El Kadi

Committee Member 1

Gamal Darwish

Committee Member 2

Amir Zeid

Committee Member 3

Amr Gamal

Document Type

Thesis

Extent

186 leaves

Library of Congress Subject Heading 1

Operating systems (Computers)

Library of Congress Subject Heading 2

Systems software.

Rights

The American University in Cairo grants authors of theses and dissertations a maximum embargo period of two years from the date of submission, upon request. After the embargo elapses, these documents are made available publicly. If you are the author of this thesis or dissertation, and would like to request an exceptional extension of the embargo period, please write to thesisadmin@aucegypt.edu

Call Number

Thesis 2003/60

Location

mgfth

Download

Share

COinS